London, UK - 6 September 2006, 23:00 GMT -It
has been an unusual move for one of the world's most eminent scientists.
Having built a career shedding light on the darkest secrets of the universe,
from the essence of space-time to the complexity of black holes, Professor
Stephen Hawking has turned to the Internet for answers to the latest conundrum
occupying his thoughts.

ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance
is a philanthropic expert initiative founded in 2001 to understand and
to address complex global challenges. ATCA conducts collective Socratic
dialogue on global opportunities and threats arising from climate chaos,
radical poverty, organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology,
robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and financial systems. Present
membership of ATCA is by invitation only and has over 5,000 distinguished
members: including several from the House of Lords, House of Commons,
EU Parliament, US Congress & Senate, G10's Senior Government officials
and over 1,500 CEOs from financial institutions, scientific corporates
and voluntary organisations as well as over 750 Professors from academic
centres of excellence worldwide.

Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

[Please note that the views presented by individual contributors
are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral.
ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and
threats.]

Re: Question of Our Survival from a Genius -- "In a world that is
in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race
sustain another 100 years?" -- Prof Stephen Hawking

It has been an unusual move for one of the world's most eminent scientists.
Having built a career shedding light on the darkest secrets of the universe,
from the essence of space-time to the complexity of black holes, Professor
Stephen Hawking has turned to the Internet for answers to the latest conundrum
occupying his thoughts.

Prof Stephen W Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death
of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London, but
during the second world war Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies.
At eleven Stephen went to St Albans School, and then on to University College,
Oxford, his father's old college. Stephen wanted to do Mathematics, although
his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at
University College, so he did Physics instead. After three years and not very
much work he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science.
He then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no-one
working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Prof Denis
Sciama, although he had hoped to get Prof Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge.
After gaining his PhD he became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial
Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy
in 1973 Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical
Physics, and since 1979 has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.
The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend
Henry Lucas, who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It
was first held by Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), and then in 1663 by Sir Isaac
Newton (1642-1727) -- the greatest English mathematician and physicist of
his generation, who laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus
and whose work on optics and gravitation makes him one of the greatest scientists
the world has known.

Prof Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With
Prof Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity
implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in
black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity
with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half
of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered
was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation
and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe
has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the
universe began was completely determined by the laws of science. His many
publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G F R Ellis,
General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W Israel, and 300 Years
of Gravity, with W Israel. Stephen Hawking has two popular books published;
his best seller A Brief History of Time, and his later book, Black Holes and
Baby Universes and Other Essays. Prof Hawking has twelve honorary degrees,
was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1982, and was made
a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals
and prizes and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National
Academy of Sciences. Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life (he
has three children and one grandchild), and his research into theoretical
physics together with an extensive programme of travel and public lectures.

His question "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and
environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"
appeared on an Internet website two months ago, immediately stirring up an
internet storm that saw more than 25,000 people log on to give their deeply-considered
views: some said we should just learn to get along, others predicted technology
would see us through, and more still invoked the powers of God, love and peace.
But what the world wanted most of all was to hear the great scientist answer
his own question, an intervention, most were convinced, that would amount
to nothing less than a definitive treatise for human survival.

"How can the human race survive the next hundred years? I don't know
the answer. That is why I asked the question, to get people to think about
it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face.

Before the 1940s, the main threat to our survival came from collisions
with asteroids. Such collisions have caused mass extinctions in the past,
but the last one was 70m years ago, so the likelihood that we will need the
services of Bruce Willis [Allusion to Film: Armageddon (1998)] in the next
hundred years is very small.

A much more immediate danger, is nuclear war. America and Russia, each
have more than enough warheads to kill everyone on Earth, several times over,
and the same may now be true of China. The world came perilously close to
nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion in the last 50 years. With
the ending of the cold war, the threat has become less acute, but it has not
gone away. There are still enough nuclear weapons stockpiled to kill us all,
and their use might be triggered by an accident that convinced a country that
it was under attack. There is now a new danger from small and potentially
unstable countries acquiring nuclear weapons. Such minor nuclear powers might
cause millions of deaths, but they would not threaten the survival of the
entire human race, unless they sparked a conflict between the major powers.

These dangers of asteroid collision and nuclear war, have now been joined
by a host of other threats to our survival. Climate change is happening at
an ever increasing rate. While we are hoping to stabilise it, and maybe even
reverse it, by reducing our CO2 emissions, the danger is that the climate
change may pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self
sustaining.

The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice reduces the amount of solar
energy that is reflected back into space and so increases the temperature
further. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities
of CO2, trapped at the bottom of the ocean, which will further increase the
greenhouse effect. Let's hope we don't end up like our sister planet Venus
with a temperature of 250C and raining sulphuric acid. There are other dangers,
such as the accidental or intentional release of a genetically engineered
virus. Each time we increase our technological powers, we add new possible
ways in which things could go disastrously wrong. The human race faces an
increasingly dangerous future. There's a sick joke that the reason we haven't
been visited by aliens is that when a civilisation reaches our stage of development,
it becomes unstable and destroys itself. In fact, I think there are other
reasons why we haven't seen any aliens, but the story shows how perilous the
situation is. The long-term survival of the human race will be safe only if
we spread out into space, and then to other stars. This won't happen for at
least 100 years so we have to be very careful. Perhaps, we must hope that
genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive."

[ENDS]

We look forward to your further thoughts, observations and views. Thank you.

Best wishes

For and on behalf of DK Matai, Chairman, Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance
(ATCA)

ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance
is a philanthropic expert initiative founded in 2001 to understand and to
address complex global challenges. ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue
on global opportunities and threats arising from climate chaos, radical poverty,
organised crime, extremism, informatics, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics,
artificial intelligence and financial systems. Present membership of ATCA
is by invitation only and has over 5,000 distinguished members: including
several from the House of Lords, House of Commons, EU Parliament, US Congress
& Senate, G10's Senior Government officials and over 1,500 CEOs from financial
institutions, scientific corporates and voluntary organisations as well as
over 750 Professors from academic centres of excellence worldwide.